


Unravel

by levendis



Series: Prompt Fics [19]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Doctor Clara, Episode Related, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Identity Porn, superhero tropes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-04-09 04:48:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4334456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is who he is now, what he's chosen to become.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unravel

**Author's Note:**

> for anonymous, who prompted: Twelve's big hair, plaid trousers, two-tshirts-and-a-hoodie are all expressions of how he feels about himself after he and Clara finally have sex after Christmas. What the hell happened that night???

The costume isn’t right, he knows that much. The tweed and muted colors, the ornament, they’re all wrong. That’s not who he is anymore. It comes off, there’s a brief interlude of nightgown and tramp-jacket, then a dead man’s suit. Then he stumbles away, clawing at the clothing too tight around his shoulders and the skin too tight around his bones.

The TARDIS opens her doors for him, leads him to the dressing room. Dressing hangar, really. An endless space filled with an endless variety of clothing: all eras and colors and shapes and sizes, fur and cotton and high-tech polymers.

He lets his eyes unfocus and his feet take him where they will. Still shaky and coltish, still settling into this latest disguise. He wanders. He’ll know it when he sees it.

And then he does: of course, of course. How could it have been anything else? He steps into the new idea of himself. Black and blue and blood-red. A bruise, a wound. Tailored wool, mirror-polished boots, collar buttoned high. This is who he is, now.

He feels sharp, in the sartorial sense and in the like-a-knife sense. He feels secure and protected and comfortable, almost, in what he’s chosen to become. He peacocks for Clara, a question is asked -

And she says she doesn’t know who he is. She looks scared, she looks sad. As his hearts fall, a carefully-sequestered part of his brain is thinking: _well, that is sort of the point._

 

* * *

_He’s an alien_ , she says. Danny Pink looks at him, and Danny Pink sees right through him. He cowers, he cringes, he rebuilds his defenses as fast as he can. It’s the jacket, it’s the stupid janitor’s jacket, the beigeness and blandness is infectious. He’s unarmed and unarmored, he’s been exposed and found wanting. He needs, very much, to not be there anymore.

But Danny Pink doesn’t get it exactly right, and somewhere behind the Doctor’s resentment is a sense of relief. He’s not the caretaker, not the space dad, not a general. Let him think he understands, then. Let him walk away - let him walk away with her - let him go with the belief that he’s met the man behind the mask.

It’s for the best, really, it is.

 

* * *

Screw it. Just - screw it. If it’s over, then it’s over, and if it’s _over_ then what does he have to prove? What’s the sense in lying? He strips himself down and dresses himself in what he’s certain had been fashionable at some point or other, although he can’t really tell. Not much good with that sort of thing.

Clara looks at him like she knows that he’s trying, but it isn’t enough. She looks at him with too many conflicting emotions, too much to keep track of. And then disaster strikes, like it tends to, and he feels the disguise slipping back on. Even if he’s not dressed for the occasion.

(He forgets, he forgets. Who is he meant to be again? Pick a Doctor, any Doctor. Points of reference. He adjusts his bow tie, he offers a Jelly Baby, he finds the well of cruelty usually tempered by the hand that wields it. Whose hand now, Theta Sigma? Who are you pretending to be today?)

She doesn’t know who he is, even if she swears that she does. Even if she looks up at him with those big wide eyes and asks him, _is this what it’s like? Is the thing inside me the same as the thing inside you?_

The monster in them both, and it’s his fault she let it into her heart.

He hangs the tuxedo up in his closet and closes the door, listening to the faint sounds of bulkheads shifting, matter dispersing, as the TARDIS whisks it away into her unfathomable, uncharted depths. He never sees it again.

 

* * *

_I’m the Doctor,_ Clara says. And she is. She has the tools of the trade and the steel in her voice, she has the conviction. He stands in his dying TARDIS and feels unnecessary. If she’s him then he is - what, exactly?

He gave up his real name long, long ago. Lost it in a bet, he’ll say. It’s unpronounceable. It’s a terrible secret that could tear a hole in the very fabric of reality.

It’s not important, is what it is. He’s not the lost little boy hiding under the covers, not the adolescent running from his responsibilities. Not anything aside from what he becomes when he straightens his waistcoat, pulls his overcoat tighter around himself, fixes the scowl in place. The Doctor, the legend. The man who fights the monsters. Everything else is irrelevant.

How can he tell her she was good? She’ll have to find out, one of these days, that the mantle she wore left no space for moral luxuries. Your hand on the throat of the world, your will against theirs - do you really want to stop and think about what that makes you?

 

* * *

A grey day, the end of the world again. Events progressing around him, without him, almost in spite of him. Missy on her knees, her mask slipping, his own threatening to follow suit. The question everyone is always so desperate to know the answer to: who are you really?

The best lies are made up of half-truths. I’m an idiot, he says. Close enough.

Danny Pink, still seeing straight through him. Danny Pink, still resolutely honest despite the agony of conversion, still so beautifully himself against the crushing, grinding, seductive rush of the hivemind. Danny loves Clara, Clara loves Danny, it’s all very simple. This is how the world is saved, how the world tends to be saved. The Doctor isn’t needed here.

The one person in the universe who recognizes him for what he is, falling apart into atoms, and a piece of him goes with her.

 _Go home,_ Clara says, a long while later. _Go to Gallifrey, be a king. Or a queen._ Yeah, maybe, why not. The continued adventures of Queen Doctor. Makes about as much sense as anything else. He compresses everything that he is, folds it all up very small and puts it away, and he hugs her, then leaves her behind.

 

* * *

(Except he can’t ever leave her behind, not really.)

They accidentally stop lying to each other. It’s Santa’s fault. The bastard can go ho-ho-ho himself, can go shove that bloody tangerine up where the snow doesn’t fall. Because this _hurts_. It’s horrible. He feels sick, he feels dizzy, he feels the rug being yanked out from beneath him, again and again and again.

Clara, beautiful brave Clara, staring straight through him. He’s got so little left to lose, but it still stings. She’ll find out the sad truth that there’s nothing behind the smoke and mirrors, or at least nothing worth seeing. She should be scared, should pity him at best, the pathetic creature that he is. She isn’t, though. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing, he can’t decide. Maybe neither. Maybe it just is.

Once he starts telling the truth, he can’t stop. Her hand in his, her name on his lips, and he’s slipping, and at a certain point he just…lets go. He lets go. If she wants it, she’s got it: here he is. Overemotional and petulant and clinging and giddy with the freedom of this, the bonkers madcap who-gives-a-shit joy. It’s a dream. It doesn’t count.

It’s a dream, and if it’s a dream it doesn’t matter: they make their confessions. Not quite “I love you”, but close enough. He sees her as she is, as she’ll always be, monster and all, and he’d like to think she can see him too. Anything’s possible in dreams.

Then he wakes up, and he thinks: well, fuck it.

 

* * *

“I’ve never seen you like this,” she says, idly tracing a pattern over his chest. Fingernails snagging on the sparse dusting of grey hairs. The warmth of her, the Clara-ness of Clara Oswald, with a gentle grip on his hearts, on the throat of the thing that he is. Not flinching, not looking away.

“Naked?”

“Well, duh. Obviously. But no, like it’s you, you-you, not ‘The Doctor’. I’m not sure how to explain it.”

He wonders what it is exactly that she sees. Who he is, when he’s not being the Doctor. He’d had a name, once. He wishes he could remember what it was.

“It’s the coat,” he supplies helpfully. “I’m not wearing the coat.”

“Yeah, about that-” She stretches languidly, flops back down on top of him. Head nestled beneath his chin. “All of time and space, and you’ve only got the one coat? One pair of trousers? Does that never get boring? Or smelly?”

“We could. Go shopping?” Right, shopping, that was what people did, yes?

She laughs, pats his stomach, hand lingering on the hollows by his hips in a way that somehow already seems familiar. “Yeah, we’ll go shopping. Plaid’s in this season, I heard. Something casual, anyway. You’d look good casual.”

“I draw the line at dungarees,” he says sternly.

She laughs again, boops him on the nose with a small but unfairly pointy finger. “So much for my dream of you in jorts, then. Oh well.”

He grimaces, but there’s no heat in it. Even jorts are fine, he supposes. Whatever jorts are. It doesn’t really matter anymore, does it. He doesn’t need to hide. Not now, not when the person who matters can see him for - whatever he is.

(He does a Google, a little bit later, after he’s managed to pry himself out of bed, for “jorts + human 20th century fashion + cool guy”. On second thought, no, that’s not fine. He does still have some sartorial standards, after all.)


End file.
